What’s more insane than trying to remake a Philippine pop song from 1986 using 2023 synthwave tools? Well… trying to remake the ENTIRE ALBUM that the song came from. And that’s how I ended up rebuilding Ikaw Lamang 2025 — initially, only wanting to make these tracks for my own listening (and my kids can testify that I listened to the tracks a LOT while driving them to and from school). But I later figured, why not release the entire album? And release it for free?
What It Sounds Like
So here you go, my homage to Zsa Zsa Padilla’s 1986 pop masterpiece Ikaw Lamang turned into a synthwave / chillwave / synthpop hybrid from 2023. Ten tracks all sung in Tagalog, and most of them pretty faithful to the original melodies and arrangements but modified to better fit the genre.
How The Project Came To Be
In 1986, I was obsessed with the Philippine pop singer Zsa Zsa Padilla. Her record label, Blackgold Records (Manila), had just released her latest album entitled Ikaw Lamang (translation: Only You) and it changed the way I viewed music as a high schooler learning the guitar and piano. Suddenly, I realized music wasn’t just a bunch of cold notes on a piano sheet. It was a fire in your soul, it was a yearning for love just out of reach, it was the ache and the awe, the despair and the desperation. I wore out the cassette tape of that album, playing it ad infinitum on a tape deck with auto reverse. I’d put on headphones at night (the ones with rough yellow foam that came with your Aiwa Walkman) and fall asleep to songs like “Umiinit” and “Sa Bawat Sandali.”
So of course, as I looked around for ideas on what project to work on next, I thought, “Why not remake 1 track from that album and turn it into a more contemporary synthwave?” That was the title track “Ikaw Lamang,” which I finished April 2023. It ended up sounding like the kind of chillwave track that Washed Out used to make in 2012.
And then I thought, “Maybe I can do one more song from there?” That track ended up being the karaoke staple ballad “Hiram,” which I finished in May 2023. And suddenly, I was two tracks down. Eight more to go. Could I actually do the rest? I wasn’t sure. But I was willing to go on the adventure of learning the songs from a musician standpoint, and trying to translate that into more modern musical arrangements.
Over the course of that year and the next, the other tracks slowly came to fruition. I finished the last remake in October 2024. And by that time, I’d been listening to the earlier remakes I’d made for over a year.